good-morrow students hello and welcome
to one of our introductory video is on
William Shakespeare in the classical
world I wanted to make sure before you
read Titus Andronicus that we had a
brief discussion about Shakespeare's
influence or I should say the way that
Shakespeare was influenced by the
classical world and in particular draw
out some of the connections between
Senecas vsts and Ovid's metamorphoses in
particular the story of Prok knee and
Philemon and how that influenced the
creation of Titus Andronicus but to do
that we need to know a little bit more
about Shakespeare a little bit about the
way he was educated and then a little
bit more about the way that classics was
present in his world so let's get
started
so a very brief background on William
Shakespeare Shakespeare was born you
know right around this time between
April 21st and 26th and 1564 and
stratford-upon-avon which is quite close
to London his father was a wealthy glove
maker who later became an alderman who's
a kind of mayor and the aldermen had a
responsibility to produce some
entertainments for the people of the
city so it's likely that Shakespeare
himself had a lot of experience either
watching clays as a child plays that his
father would have helped to produce and
maybe even acting and some of them as
well he was likely educated at the
Stratford Grammar School and we'll come
back and talk about that in just a
moment but interestingly even though his
father was a man of means Shakespeare
never went on to go to a university like
like Oxford or Cambridge which would
have been pretty common for a young man
both his age and of his father's wealth
but she experienced over her friend
pregnant her name was Anne Hathaway she
was 26 and they eventually got married
and mind up having three children
together when the eldest was a daughter
and then he had twins a girl and a boy
later
so Shakespeare never technically got a
degree he never went on to university
but he did begin writing clays early on
in the 1590s when he was only not quite
30 years old one of his earliest plays
was Titus Andronicus which he wrote in
1594 so bear that in mind this is one of
his his earliest he probably started out
in the theater world as a script editor
and an actor and then later made his
name as a playwright in his own right
but most likely he was an actor himself
he did become a shareholder in the Lord
Chamberlain's men's theatre company and
as you may remember from our other video
on Renaissance England theatre this was
the company that later would go on to
build the Globe Theatre which was kind
of Shakespeare's home theater and his
acting troops home theater that he
eventually made quite famous so
eventually the Chamberlain's Men were
kind of bought out and underwritten by
the King so they became the king's men
and in addition to producing plays at
the globe when the weather was nice they
also moved into black friars which
you'll remember from the other video as
well as the indoor theater when the
globe burnt down the Chamberlain's Men
Arms re the Kingsmen elected not to not
to rebuild it and Shakespeare himself
died just a few a few years later in
1616 so his career was relatively brief
in terms of production but as we know as
inheritors of this tradition it was
quite brilliant so let's talk a little
bit about Shakespeare's education so I
mentioned that he likely attended the
Stratford Grammar School and that would
have been a school for middle-class boys
much like Shakespeare and the wealth
that his father's family created so he
was not Noble and he did not come from a
noble family but he came from a wealthy
family his father was
merchants he had a trade and was able to
make enough money to keep the family
very comfortably so many of these boys
who would it and it was boys only who
would attend school would grow up to be
lawyers or clerks clerics in the Church
of England secretaries of politicians or
politicians themselves what one scholar
called the mainstays of the rapidly
expanding Elizabethan state so the boys
who graduated from these grammar schools
were essentially becoming an
intellectual working-class almost like
an intelligentsia of sorts they all had
they would go on to get their degrees at
Oxford or Cambridge and would eventually
become the knowledge workers of sorts of
the of the Renaissance at the school the
curriculum was almost entirely focused
on reading works from Roman antiquity so
there was no history math or geography
or science as standalone subjects right
mostly what you learned was Latin
grammar how to read Latin and then
eventually how to you know to take the
knowledge that you were reading from
Latin to educate you on other subjects
so some of the exercises they would do
would be to take English or tick
something in Latin translated to English
and then back into Latin or vice-versa
take something from English translate to
Latin and then back into English there
their devotion to the learning Latin was
such that they even spoke Latin in
school as a living language and they
didn't speak English at school and if
you'll recall the Catholic Church still
to this day maintained that Latin is its
its language of choice it's official
language and we have to remember that up
through the end of the Renaissance Latin
was the kind of the political language
we think of that as English today where
almost everyone needs to know English to
be successful in a global world but in
the Renaissance it was Latin you needed
to know Latin to be successful they did
learn some of the tenants of ancient
rhetoric how to be a good speaker a good
orator to be persuasive but
interestingly they did not have as much
exposure to ancient Greek and that was
largely an issue of regionality
interestingly after the fall of the
Roman Empire in 576 I'm sorry for 76 EE
concentration of power was divided
between the west which was Rome and the
east which was Constantinople and while
the west began to fade a little bit the
East continued to flourish and there was
a lot of contact with many of the people
in Turkey and moving farther east who
continued to speak Greek so the
knowledge of Greek and the preservation
of Greek and Greek literature was very
much focused in Constantinople moving
east whereas the knowledge of Latin and
the preservation of Latin was very much
focused in the West so that's just a
little bit of an interesting tidbit but
it also explains why only a few very
well-educated men knew ancient Greek in
Renaissance England it wasn't something
that was taught in schools so what does
that mean for Shakespeare so we have to
imagine that as a young boy Shakespeare
learned how to read Latin pretty well
and he would have read a lot of the
Latin texts that his student are not his
students I'm sorry that his teachers
would have given to him and he would
have become well-versed and probably a
pretty quick reader and possibly a very
deep reader and there is quite a lot of
Latin that that sort of survived from
antiquity some of the most kind of what
we considered to be our canonical works
but we also have to remember that at
this time there was also a resurgence of
interest in the arts and literature and
philosophy of antiquity and this is what
we call the Renaissance in general and
this time in England also saw a
flourishing of translations of works
from Latin into English so we have this
wonderful sort of perfect storm of
conditions where we have a new interest
our renewed interest in the art and
literature from the ancient world we
have an educated class of kind of middle
class upper middle class English people
who are looking for education and have
money who have money to spend on
education and we have the printing press
we have a way to create and disseminate
many many many copies of different works
of literature so these translations
became quite popular so we know from
many many you know centuries of
scholarship on Shakespeare that he did
rely on a couple of different
translations of works that eventually
became some of his greatest influences
in his own plays but again we have to
imagine that Shakespeare himself was
able to read the Latin so it was
probably more comfortable for him to
read the English of course as it is for
us to read things in English name even
if we didn't know a second language but
he had the ability to dive a little bit
deeper into some of his Roman readings
so some examples of the books that were
of most importance to him one of them
would be Thomas North's translation of
Plutarch's lives from 1715 seventy nine
and this was literally a collection of
biographies of famous Greeks and Romans
written by Plutarch but you can see that
Shakespeare essentially wrote four
possibly five plays based on the lives
of Plutarch among his most famous being
Julius Caesar Antony and Cleopatra and
Coriolanus in 1581 ten tragedies of
Seneca were translated into English and
they were translated by a bunch of
different college basically college boys
at Oxford in Cambridge who really wanted
to produce the plays and to perform in
those plays at their universities so
among those in 1581 was Titus Andronicus
I'm sorry that was diocese was among
those that were that were translated and
Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus in
1594 that's when it was first published
so just about 13 years after that Senate
cut production where that Seneca
translation came out by far I don't want
to say by far Plutarch's lives is pretty
influential but possibly right alongside
or possibly just edging it out just a
little bit would be Ovid's metamorphoses
the metamorphose ease is the large kind
of epic poem of a collection of stories
about the ways that the gods transform
humans into many different objects over
time and the story of proc knee and
Philomela that you read for our next
class is one of the stories that
survives or is included in the
metamorphose ease so in 1567 arthur
Golding created this kind of seminal
english translation of the metamorphose
'is that we know shakespeare relied on
for several different plays but among
the most famous obviously are Titus
Andronicus and then also a Midsummer's
Night's Dream Romeo and Juliet is also
inspired by the story of Pyramus and
Thisbe that comes from the metamorphosis
that's also included in A Midsummer
Night's Dream and you can just see
echoes of these stories throughout one
last one that I'll mention is and a
comedy actually by loudest which is
called the midnight me my night just
means the Tumen Ike misses it's a story
about twin brothers who have a series of
unfortunate events related to identity
confusion they're twins and they keep
getting confused for each other so it's
possible that the 1595 translation of
the minakami by William Warner might
have inspired Shakespeare to write a
comedy of errors which is very much
along that same lines twin brothers who
are mistaken for each other kind of
falling into all of these different
misadventures so really what I wanted to
outline is that Shakespeare does in fact
he is a deep reader of the classics he's
very steeped in this tradition and there
were not only in his own
but also in his own time a fair amount
of resources available to him that would
allow him to dive relatively deeply into
the literature that we recognize today
as being canonical especially Latin
literature and of interest in the to the
ancient world so as we continue on with
our discussion of Titus Andronicus of
course we'll be leaning a little bit
more heavily on the story of property
and Philomela and we'll be discussing a
little bit more in depth how Seneca
influenced the way that Shakespeare
structured Titus Andronicus
alright until then I wish you good Eve
and I will see you next time bye-bye